Photographer Masumi Hayashi Found Shot To Death

August 21, 2006|By JON THURBER / Los Angeles Times

She and an artist/ maintenance man were found dead near her Cleveland apartment.

Masumi Hayashi, a photographer who used panoramic photo collages to make beautiful and powerful statements on toxic waste sites, abandoned prisons and remnants of the internment camps that held Japanese-Americans during World War II, has died. She was 60.

A longtime professor of photography at Cleveland State University, Hayashi was found shot to death Thursday night near her third-floor apartment in Cleveland, according to her son Dean Keesey of Oakland, Calif.

Another person, John Jackson, 51, an artist and sculptor who worked as a maintenance man in the apartment complex on the city's west side, was found shot to death near the ground floor of the building.

Efforts Saturday to reach Cleveland police investigators handling the case were unsuccessful. According to Saturday's Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, police arrested Hayashi's neighbor, Jacob Cifelli, 29, in the killings and recovered a handgun at the scene.

News accounts said Hayashi had complained for several months about loud music coming from Cifelli's apartment. When she responded recently with a call to Cifelli's mother at her place of work, her protests were answered with gunfire Thursday night allegedly from Cifelli, The Plain Dealer reported. It was not immediately clear whether Jackson had a role in the complaints about the music.

The bodies of Hayashi and Jackson were found by Cifelli's mother, The Plain Dealer reported.

Cifelli was undergoing questioning Saturday and officially had not been charged with the killings. Hours before the incident, Cleveland police issued a warrant for his arrest for failing to pay a fine on a weapons conviction.

Friends remembered Hayashi fondly Saturday.

"She's the least confrontational person I ever met," said a friend, Stephen White, a Los Angeles-based photography collector and dealer. "She was a gentle, easygoing person. She never quite got the due she deserved. I always felt she would be more successful as an artist if she was more aggressive."

Hayashi lived in Southern California until she married. She joined her husband, who was then in the Navy, in Florida and earned both her bachelor's degree and her master's in fine arts at Florida State University. She joined the Cleveland State faculty in 1982.

She was involved in a variety of artistic endeavors including printmaking, silk screening and photo-transfer quilting before turning to photography, her son said.

She developed a systematic photographic style where she took multiple exposures and assembled them into panoramic scenes. The finished pieces were large, sometimes 6 feet or more in width.

In addition to her son, survivors include a daughter, Lisa Takata, a brother, Seigo, and sisters, Connie, Amy, Nancy and Joanne. *